Titans are in Town

by Tomislav Sunic

  Far back behind the bridge that spanned Town’s center, with the little island jutting out into the Sea, Held could spot the fluorescent surface with sunshine bathing on its small and nervous wave crests. The center of his proverbial Town was long gone — only the shallow outside walls and holes left with lots of graffiti in black sprayed on the front. “Water,” “food,” “water again,” were just some of the graffiti messages designed more to satisfy the good consciousness of thirsty subterranean mischlings and less as a sign to attract a foreign glance of some long-awaited and never materializing aerial savior. Honestly, the whole Town scenario was just a matter of perspective of a right time. The town of Magdeburg, a few epochs earlier, before Held had it destroyed by his own scavengers, was a town where a thinking person could enjoy drinking beer from fine porcelain glasses and travel back in time. Soon Magdeburg turned into a serial Chaos town where past memories were quickly extinguished in a matter of hours. The same story was developing now in Held’s own Town except that death was this time coming not horizontally but vertically from beyond the nearby hills. The same scenario was awaiting the placidity of other towns back there across the sea still thriving in the adagio of funny and static times. Held witnessed firsthand how the town of Los Angeles had become a dead town when it had been captured by species who of course did not carry the name of Saturns, yet were good enough to change the spirit of the town. Back then those Saturn-like creatures did not carry weapons, but dragged along young, swarthy and yelling children pulling the arms of their squatting mothers. These creatures were smaller in size, with darker features on their scared faces, but as times moved on they gradually became less scared and finally turned their facial features into hideous grimaces. With their will to live and their will to proliferate they soon dislodged Held and his lookalikes from that town.

  The same scenario was now taking place all over the Wild West, with dead towns popping up all over. Held’s Town was now on the frontline.

  Seen from the distant sea Held’s Town looked like a ghost town protruding from his northern district like a thin arm out into the depth of the Sea; as if his Town was trying to catch some fish. Further north in a semicircular line, Town was surrounded by makeshift minefields and graves of Held’s fallen fellow Titans. From a bird’s perspective Held’s decapitated Town looked like a depopulated raft. Held thought about Gericault’s painting showing its seafaring inhabitants, who like his own Townspeople, gradually turned into man-eaters. Actually, Chaos had started a long time ago with Gods as man-eaters, even at the beginning of the creation of the cosmos when Uranus had devoured his own father and set in motion man-eating habits with the Town’s subsequent culinary customs. What could be worse than being stranded with your tribe, far away from other people, far away on some distant shore not even knowing that you are about to die? Town could not inspire fear in the mountain Saturns; it could not console Held either. It looked like a hollow Titanic on the bottom of the Dead Sea. His only hope was that his Titans would someday wake up and shake off the Earth.

  Heroine was Held’s only true companion; an emaciated tall lady of Mediterranean allure. Heroine’s long black hair was always neatly combed behind her small ears and her short and shrunken forehead was riddled with worried wrinkles, and her nervous black eyes displayed the indescribable sum total of Town’s tragedy. Once upon a recent time Heroine was an attractive piece of flesh running the cabaret show in an apolitical Town. For years she was the Town’s best entertainer whose long legs all passing males avidly yearned for. Every man would look over his shoulders in the direction of her swift body language which emitted vicarious allure and vicious lust. Every male in Town hated Held because his physique back then surpassed those of all other male bipeds, while his puzzling words dropped the pants of every Town’s beauty, including Heroine’s.

  Once upon a time in Town, Heroine used to walk graciously, and the rumor spread that her thin feet never touched the pavement. Indeed, Heroine was once a levitating beauty who defied old age and who had skipped her mid-life crisis and represented the static sum of the Golden Age. Oh yes, this was all very, very recently! A year or an eon ago? Perhaps. Now, Heroine’s body looked worn out, her crooked tired feet looked like those of the clumsy weird sister Baba Roga, and her erratic voice scared quite a few stray dogs within the remnants of the scarred Town.

  Heroine and Held both knew full well that Titanic tornadoes were lurking on the static horizon and that the bygone crises were just a prelude to a massive cosmic cataclysm. For millions of those moments the speed of history has been defying the logic of Town’s own timeframe. Now, the logic of the worst was making its steady headway into the empty skulls of Town’s resident left-overs. No better was the underworld populated mostly by mischlings and wogs who had once enjoyed civic privileges provided by the Lord Protector of the nearby Saturns. During the political changeover, however, the new government ordered them back down under in order to keep the company of the dormant Titans. The temporal void of Town was now approaching the superlative fulfillment of anguish by Townspeople above, for whom, alas, there were no new words of salvation coined yet. The bottom of despair for Townspeople was being hit every day, only to help rediscover the subterranean species with their new political appetites. They knew well that up on the surface, right beyond the hill, they could count on the fast approaching friendly Saturns.

  They too, Heroine and Held thought that Chaos would soon be over. A nearby miracle was anxiously awaited from the Wild West neighborhood. However, when distant rhetorical Samaritans, along with their culinary diplomats had abrogated their vicarious help, a deadly despair set in anew in Town. There were no more credible foreign priests left to contain the flow of Town’s accelerated history. At long last, Held and Heroine realized that new Chaos in their old Town was finally announcing the beginning of a new Titanic age — with no more Titans left out on the bottom of the nearby Sea. Other than a few left-over local Titans, including Hero and his kindred, there was no escape and no other world in sight.

  Chapter II: Slow Dying

  Death has its pleasures which the Ancients knew how to cherish. The Greeks who fought the Persians at Thermopylae knew that the retreat would mean Chaos. But not chaos for others. Had they failed, the Town would have failed; had they retreated from their truth, another Saturnine verity would have entered Town. Held’s bookish fellow traveler, a guy by the name of Fabrice, as well as his old deceased master who went by the name of Bossuet, had warned him long ago that “there won’t be any vestige on Earth on which we are; the flesh will change its nature; the corpse will take on different names...” Alas, in Held’s mind this resonated like a swan song reminiscent of death, and announcing its galloping proximity, yet never hitting him with a full blow in his face. Millions of moments later, after Bossuet had passed away, some lost Titans at the town called Stalingrad had emblems of human skulls and human bones engraved on their caps, as if they were invoking their own fast approaching death, as if they all wished to defy the inescapable death wish. In a nearby country known as Spain, not very long ago some of Held’s now defunct colleagues sang another swan song with erotic pleasure, “viva la muerte!” and mournfully regretted the bells that had abruptly ceased to toll. Fabrice, his watchtower alter-ego, used to sermon Held with that rhyme every eerie morning during their strolls through the nearby minefields...

  ***

  Heroes and henchmen, culprits and cowards, humans and beasts, for eons they have acted in unison, as if they had passionately awaited their turn of death embrace in a huge hug of forgetfulness, and in the kiss of the deep sea of the unknown. In his decapitated Town Held has also longed millions of times for fading away in time, which for ages had stubbornly refused all his inducements. With no future in sight Held could barely conceive of retrieving the bewildering pleasure of his own not too distant past. Heroine had come to foresee her own approaching Titanic phase much better than had Held. During her cabaret years she clung to the old folk proverb which her dece
ased mother had once taught her: “Everything must end well, all peoples from all the antipodes should soon live happily ever after.” “Happily my foot!,” Held would retort. Yes indeed, this rhyme of happily ever after sounded like a lullaby to later transgender couples madly in love. This is what Held had read many times as a young boy in Town’s mandatory literature. The hybrid conviviality of Town’s interregnum, which had lasted only a twinkle of Transatlantic post-history, came to be known in Town as Pax Atlantica. This Pax was teeming with the ideology of fun, with plenty of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. It did arrest the flow of time for some time in the tepid history of the merry-go-round period, creating an illusion that everything was possible, and that every wishful thought had to be fulfilled. Held and Heroine had also fallen into that trap, albeit for only a brief span of time. Saturn’s lying had provided Heroine with shielding balm for her cabaret mascara in which she indulged for some time. As for Held, it meant for him some pastoral pleasures of short duration.

  But then, the suddenly invading Chaos changed Heroine’s surreal cabaret make-up, and her mundane pleasure came apart just like in Magritte’s painting which she had once, in moments of anger, tossed against her cabaret walls. Heroine’s flesh and dope career ended and her new life of the weird sister Baba Roga had begun, this time for real. The age of fast food and fast sex came apart just like a fast rollercoaster approaching its last stop before crashing into its endgame scenario. Heroine and Held discovered that they had suddenly grown very, very old. Now in deserted Town, baked under the sunbeams from above and blinded by fluorescent wave crests from the nearby sea, they were both left stranded, staring into bits and pieces of their broken luck which they nervously counted on the fragments of their broken nails.

  ***

  A long time ago, Held had a dream, a real dream, that Chaos was just a benign new cycle of History, and that his proverbial stream of thought would soon be readjusted by his willpower. Yet at that time he did not venture to talk about it for fear of being tagged by Townspeople as a weirdo or a kook. But the subsequent flows of time set him right. When the first man-eating Saturn came from the mountain slopes, gone forever was his peaceful pondering about to be or not to be in his hitherto existence at which he had always expertly excelled. He ceased to be a motherless stranger or a distant Titan he once was when on the eternal run. Gone were his proxy escapades into Hamlet-like scenes, as he was becoming more and more reminded that his Heroine resembled more and more the skinless and shrieking Hecuba and he, himself, the last Titan in town.

  Held’s vicarious musings about his Titanic return into Town turned into deadly reality when he decided to adopt the surreal name of Held. He had to change his name by the time of his return from the Wild West, simply because old names meant nothing any longer. He might have just as well adopted the name of Nobody, or Peter Pan or Typhoon, or Prometheus, or Ivan Ivanovich, or Joe Sixpack, given that the Town’s birth certificates, let alone Yellow Pages, had been used up for the Town’s bonfires. Citizenship was a word long gone from all dictionaries. This time around it was the objective unknown reality which prompted Held’s subjective decision making. Times for intellectual travelogues began to disappear as Held had learned to judge and to be judged only by Town’s mortals & Saturn’s mortars on the scorched earth with no transparent heavens in sight. Held’s mind was desperately levitating; his decisions were getting utterly fruitless. He himself was becoming a Titan in Town.

  Chapter III: Saturn’s Menu

  The beauty of the Titans lies in the fact that they defy the moralizing and pontificating of all the preachers. Their horrible fate is that they never pass away. Chaos has always served them as a big sift, as a gigantic catalyst for old and worn-out ideas and for the tired human species in need of self-recycling in order to avoid being thrown into a massive and bottomless sea of oblivion. It had once taken Held in the Wild West an eon to craft sparse friendship — only to realize now that a far-flung Saturnine fire could immediately destroy all his amicable Town ties. At some distant time the word “truth” meant to him something precious, as long as his truth was not belied by the subsequent Saturnine verities. Now, the new truth beyond good and evil has become just another cliché whose rhymes were echoed on all wavelengths in the remnants of his scorched Town. So why then should he not believe in the veracity of the Saturnine truths out there, behind the hill and behind the minefields? Or for that matter the truthful lies of mischlings in Town’s underbelly? After all, the early Cronus alias Saturn also legitimized his cannibalizing habits with his own set of homemade lies. The incoming Chaos served Held as a good catechism, providing him with different spiritual menus for different portions of time. Words like “justice,” “peace” and “love” had once a different meaning back in the Wild West, so much different from truthful lies of the earlier Bolshevik times whose vernacular Held had to learn by heart if he was to survive. The changing vocabulary on Town’s menu forced Held now to throw off his delusions of everlasting peace, as well as to reject the illusions of future static times. Perhaps, thought Held, Chaos must be a consistent predicament for all humans, because it cleanses off the premises of bad guys and safeguards the life of good guys, while speeding up history into gears unknown to both the Saturns and Titans. The new catalogue of Who’s Who was now being rapidly rewritten in Town, similarly to different towns and in different epochs. But of which towns? Persepolis? Timgad, Palmira? Zagreb? Or Los Angeles? These were all dead towns by now. Only his Town continued to outlive itself. Held tried to cope with the current version of Town’s veracity, which sooner, rather than later, would be reinterpreted, either by the new Saturns, new Titans, new heroes or demigods, as yet another cosmic joke.

  Just a mile from the bridge where he was standing, further down south lay the island of Rab, which used to serve before Chaos erupted as an attractive place for serial naked fun, a savvy speck of Earth dotted with nudist beaches and five star hotels. Now, after the Saturnine onslaught had begun, the island had turned into a charred mountain consisting of blackened stones and scattered metal from all kinds of destroyed military equipment where no life was allowed to thrive. Except that once in a while Held could spot flocks of seagulls flying over the island, heading north to some place to nest, or searching for a pole to light on. And yet, just several cosmic fractions before Rab became a center of naked sex and fast food, it used to be a killing field where Tito’s Saturns had extinguished hundreds of lives in one hour by tossing live bodies into freshly dug pits. The moments of subsequent tourist pleasures were preceded several years earlier by the moments of horrible death. Nothing worse can occur to those captured by the Saturns and their Saturnine progeny than being cornered into a slow dying process, in a sealed off tunnel shaft, or in some abandoned coal mine. Now, there were no more canaries left in the mine! How could somebody conceive of building hotels and having fun at the location where the condensed time had swallowed so many crowded lives? This is how time functioned when Held was somewhat younger and when he did not know a word about the morbid mystique of the island of Rab. He knew, however, that he had always lived parallel lives in different epochs and eons. In fact, he was not afraid at all of dying now or getting captured by the Saturns, or being thrown into a furnace, or into some bottomless mine shaft. He had long given up his onetime identity and had it replaced by a host of parallel timeless identities, including those of his real or alleged Saturnine or Titanesque foes respectively.

  The whole Town back in the Transatlantic Lull as well as the whole area around it, similarly to the island of Rab, was a prime target of people searching for leisure and fun — only to become now the hell on Earth. The whole place once had huge billboards showing Town as the best sex destination with naked girls on it displaying fake dentures and huge breasts. Town was then, in those crowded Wild Western times, getting so thick with tourists that one could barely elbow his way through his own meaning of time. Now Town, even when Held could capture moments of rest, became the symbol of dread and t
he dead. Each of its surviving minutes hinged on the decisions of the nearby Saturns beyond the hill. His decision to build a public library made no sense, because the next day it would be destroyed by the Saturn fire. Burying the dead was also a waste of time because the whole cemetery had turned into a wasteland. This was the reason why, upon Held’s insistence, the Town council decided to ship those about to die and those already dead, to the mischling underworld and notify the Hades’ navigator Charon at the Styx Ltd. of the Town’s decision.

  Rest, repose, and reminiscence were the commodities of high luxury which Held and Heroine, as well as other tired Town’s Titans, could hardly afford.

  Each time when Held thought back in time he could imagine scenes of boundless joy and bodily pleasures, which he had learned to savor alone in the Wild West. Oh, how surreal looked those countless millions of moments, each filled with sensuous joy and elegant pep talk in front of the gorgeous Pacific beauties! Well-crafted women, nectar, necklace, and never-ending necking, coupled, of course, with musing mescaline or pondering peyote, somewhere on the Dionysian Santa Barbara beaches. Yes those were the images that belonged to a different town, to a different timeframe, and to different twilight dreams. These scenes of the past seemed so ravishing against the present background of Held’s acute and actual Town. But he knew, as the Ancients had taught him that this was a big trap, a Big Lie again. It can’t be possible that some species have fun whilst just beneath, a few feet away hundreds of thousands of barren bones shriek for a breath of air. The everlasting life would be the worst punishment imaginable for humans. It would mean an additional load, not just of stones to be rolled up the hill, but the burden of additional layers of memories and more and more of his digging into his primeval lives.